Andrew Ross Sorkin Declares New Jobs Report Gives Fed Chair ‘Upper Hand’ Against Trump

CNBC Squawk Box co-anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin flagged that Thursday’s strong jobs report for June will give Fed Chair Jerome Powell the “upper hand” as he continues to resist pressure from President Donald Trump to lower interest rates.

Figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that the economy added 147,000 jobs last month with unemployment down to 4.1 percent, defying economists’ expectations of a slowdown and signaling ongoing resilience in the labor market despite the administration’s imposition of tariffs.

The report was published just hours after Trump’s latest broadside at Powell, in which the president demanded he “resign immediately” after the central bank chair refused repeated requests from the president to lower the benchmark interest rate.

Speaking to MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Thursday, however, Sorkin told host Willie Geist that the new jobs number gives Powell the “upper hand” with the solid report justifying his decision to not cave to Trump’s rate cut.

Just overnight, if you saw, you had the president saying that Jay Powell should be resigning from his role because he should be lowering interest rates. This morning, I think this jobs number would give Jay Powell the upper hand to say, ‘Look, the reason I’m not lowering interest rates is the economy actually continues to be quite good,’ which is something you’d think that the president would enjoy and like.

So, some kind of interesting cross currents to think about. But nonetheless, I think the chance right now of interest rates going lower anytime soon [will be] taken off the table a bit this morning as a function of these jobs numbers.

Watch above via MSNBC.